Piecework

“Bastards, murderin’ bastards,” someone shouted from the darkness. There were more voices in the dark, running feet, smashing glass, isolated shots, and still the fog moved down the Falls Road. The British laid down a barrage of 4-inch-long rubber bullets from grenade launchers and the young people scattered. More shots came from the Divis Street flats. Two rounds slammed into the plywood covering of the shuttered bar where I was standing. And then suddenly it was quiet. The fog covered everything, and the British soldiers started to withdraw.

It was Friday morning and the night belonged to the IRA.

III.

BELFAST

You see them shopping along the Shankill Road in the dull grainy Northern afternoons: tidy women pushing baby carriages, men in wool suits, children playing with plastic guns. The side streets are bristling with Union Jacks and red, white and blue bunting, and you can see the gray iron wall of the “peace line” at the end of some of the streets, and the spray-can graffiti of the Protestant ghetto: “IRA Beware” and “No Pope Here” and “Home Rule Is Rome Rule” and “No Surrender.”

These are the Protestants of Northern Ireland, and seldom has a majority ever acted more like a minority; these are people who inhabit a fortress, their minds in a state of siege.

“We’re British,” a man told me one afternoon, standing angrily on a corner of Sandy Row, with the stunted slum houses of the Protestant working class ghetto spread out behind him. “We’ll remain British, even if Heath sells us out, even if Faulkner sells us out.”

The man was a welder in the Harland and Woolf shipyards (in which there are only 100 Catholics in a 9000-man work force). He spoke in the hard, heavy accents of the Belfast working class; his tone, with all its cargo of intractable resentment and suspicion of betrayal, was unmistakably Irish. In London, he would be labeled “Paddy” along with the rest of the Irish. But here in Belfast, this city strangling on the stale meal of history, he was insisting that he was British; it was as if a can of tomato soup, through some act of pop alchemy, could describe itself as a ham sandwich.

“The basic confusion here,” a British reporter said to me one night, “is that they’ve got their notions of lunatic patriotism mixed up with their notions of lunatic religion. They’re sick with religion.”

The phrase was apt. If Belfast is not precisely sick with organized religion, it is certainly sick with churches (the buildings, not the faiths). The churches are everywhere: 55 for the Church of Ireland (Anglican), 65 for the Presbyterians, 35 for the Methodists, 4 for the Reformed Presbyterians, 17 for the Baptists, 9 for the Congregationalists, 6 for the Evangelical Presbyterians, 24 for the Roman Catholics, 4 for the Non-Subscribing Presbyterians, 8 for the Elem Pentecostals, 1 for the Christian Scientists, 13 for the Salvation Army, 2 for the Society of Friends, 2 for the Moravians, 5 for the Apostolics, 1 for the Plymouth Brethren, 2 for the Emanual Mission, 5 for the Free Presbyterians, 3 for the Church of Latter Day Saints, 1 for the Seventh Day Adventists, plus 1 Railway Mission, 1 Coalmen’s Mission, and a number of smaller gospel halls. There is one church for every 1000 adults. And in the 1961 census, only 64 people in all of Northern Ireland (pop: 1,500,000) described themselves as atheists.

The result of this overdose of organized Christianity has been destruction, bigotry, fear, hatred, paranoia and death. Walking the streets of this town, where the smoke from the bombed-out buildings hangs in the air for days while church spires stab at the skies like the spears of pagan armies, it is difficult to understand what Christianity thinks it is doing here.

There are, of course, thousands of Protestants who are neither bigots nor Bible-thumping fundamentalist lunatics, and a number of them have finally begun to talk about the inevitability of a 32-county Ireland. But down in those Shankill churches, many of the less educated are continuing to lock themselves into the prison of dogma.

The phrases have the high keening tenor of apocalypse about them: “Roman Catholicism is the Anti-Christ, Greatest of all Harlots, and Cause of all Our Present Discontents. Bernadette Devlin is the Pope’s Whore.”

The mixture of lurid sexual metaphor with statements of moral purity laces the language of the Protestant ghettoes; the language is accompanied by an almost touchingly naive belief in the now-forgotten slogans of the past. Consider the words of one Protestant battle hymn (“Ye Loyalists of Ireland”):

Ye Loyalists of Ireland
Come, Rally round the Throne!
Thro’ weal or woe prepare to go,
Make England’s Cause your own;
Remember your allegiance,
Be this your Battle Cry,
“For Protestant Ascendancy
In Church and State we’ll Die!”